In ‘Cars 2,’ John Lasseter Says Big Oil is the ‘Uber Bad Guy’

“Cars 2” director John Lasseter talked with The Wall Street Journal in his office at the Emeryville headquarters of Pixar Animation Studios, where he is chief creative officer.

The film takes the friendly automobiles of the original “Cars” and transplants them into a fast-paced international spy caper—with Mater, a rusty tow truck, as the unlikely hero.

Having served as executive producer on “Cars 2” during the first few years of work on the film, Lasseter stepped in as director just last year and overhauled major elements of the plot.

Lasseter discussed the film with the Journal nine days before its release—and less than three weeks after the death of his 87-year-old father, Paul, whom he credits as an inspiration for both “Cars” movies.

I’m sorry to hear about your father’s recent death. I understand he was a car enthusiast?

John Lasseter: Yeah. All my life, he worked for Chevy dealerships as a parts manager. And so, as a kid, I would work in his parts department, first as a stock boy putting away parts and dusting bins and all that stuff. And then when I turned 16, I got my driver’s license. I was a delivery boy and would drive the parts truck all over all over that area of Los Angeles.

It must have been quite an education.

It was fun. I liked it because I loved cars. It was at kind of the tail end of all the really cool Chevy muscle cars. You know, the Camaros, the Chevelles, the Corvettes and all that stuff. It was the early ’70s.

The visuals in “Cars 2” were very impressive. And the story is quite a departure from the first movie.

It’s by far the most complex Pixar film ever made, kind of times 10. It starts with the genre of the film by picking a spy genre. I just love spy movies. “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” was my favorite TV show growing up.

And so, I just love all the great locales that spy movies go to and say, “OK, we’ve got to go to cool places,” right? One of the ideas of the movie was to take the characters, the car characters, out of Radiator Springs, off of Route 66, and take them around the world.

As I was doing publicity for “Cars,” I traveled around the world, and I kept thinking about cars as characters. Our characters in Tokyo, in London, and Paris, Italy, Germany—all these places where they all have their own unique car cultures and car histories.

The amazing Harley Jessup, the production designer…decided to take that and put in the architecture and reimagine all these famous landmarks around the world, what they would look like in the “Cars” world.

There’s a lot of visual detail.

I love the detail in our films. I believe God is in the details. We put so much detail into this film. The more you look, the more you’ll see of car parts, car shapes. Every sign, every street name, everything… Every ad on the sides or on the buses or things like this are all unique to the car world and unique to whatever country you’re in.

How active was your role in shaping that kind of detail?

I really delegated to these people I worked with for so long. I just said, “OK. We’ve got a lot to do in a short amount of time. We want to make this huge movie. We have this many people and this much time. OK. This is what it needs to be. Go!”

I really delegated to a lot of these people, and they just took it and ran with it…. To me, my number one goal with this movie is to make a fun movie ‑ a fun movie to watch, and make it really cool.

Because it’s really kind of a spy movie, [with] the sort of international style formula racing. All that stuff is so sexy and cool, and I just wanted to wrap that up in. And it works perfectly, because Mater, the rusty tow truck from Radiator Springs, doesn’t fit in any of those worlds. That’s part of the emotional core of the story.

“Cars” was about Lightning McQueen learning to slow down and to enjoy life. The journey is the reward. This, I wanted the whole pace of the movie to be different and to be like, you needed seat belts in the theater. It was so fast paced.

There’s so much detail in this film. You kind of have to see it a second or a third time to soak in all that’s there.

The three wheel car that appears briefly in a Paris flea market—was that based on a real vehicle?

There’s a whole class of these cars that were these type of cars. They’re notoriously unstable. You can’t turn very fast, and they kind of roll a lot. They’re kind of all over Europe. So we made up our own. I love French auto design of the early ’50s, ’60s, early ’70s of Citorens, Renaults, and Peugeots. They’re so unique. So we kind of pulled from a lot of our favorite older French cars and kind of merged it together into this car. We call it Tomber, which means “to trip” in French.

When you stepped in from executive producer to director what were some of the changes you made?

We revamped the whole story, the whole bad-guy arc. To me, there always needs to be a logic to our movies. No matter what subject matter it is, they have to be logical for the world we’re creating. I kept thinking about, “OK. A spy movie in the world where cars are alive. What would be a really good kind of über bad guy? Who is an über bad guy?” I kept going to big oil. This is before what happened in the Gulf of Mexico.

Why isn’t alternative fuel more… Why isn’t everybody jumping on that bandwagon? It makes so much sense: Electricity, solar, whatever. There’s ethanol. There’s all this stuff you could be doing. And so I thought, well, that could be really cool in that you could have big oil versus alternative fuel. That’s when we kind of crafted the bad guy’s story.

The greatest bad guys, you understand where they’re coming from. They believe they’re doing the right thing. Sometimes it’s for greed, sometimes it’s for other reasons, but they are what they call the center of good. They always believe they’re doing the right thing.

How much research goes into something like Mater’s riff about the history of air-cooled Volkswagen engines?

Every automotive detail is accurate. That’s what’s kind of fun about Mater, who seems like this idiot savant about obscure little knowledge.

How was making a spy movie different from other Pixar movies?

As a director and as a storyteller, I love challenging myself and doing something different. When we make these movies, it’s almost like weaving a basket. You figure out the story, and then you come up with something toward the second or third act, and then you go, “OK, we’ve got to set that up.” So you have to go backward in the movie and change things here so that that will work. And then you come up with ideas, and there’s just constant back and forth of the whole story.

You don’t just start from the beginning, write it, and get to the ending, you’re done. It’s this journey with our storytelling. That’s why it takes three to four years to make our films. A good two and a half of that three years is story. It’s just this constant weaving and trying things and trying things separately. We’re constantly redoing it.

I really enjoyed the spy genre because of that weaving. Trying to make it so that the clues were set, but they were not obvious. And then you go, “OK. It was too obvious. Let’s make it less obvious. Now it’s not… OK, now he said this. People are confused here. Let’s go back and we need to set that up a little more clearly.”

When you came in as director and started revamping the story, had any animation started?

Brad Lewis, the co‑director, I brought him on early, because one of the things I knew that I would not be able to do as much as this movie needed was the research. I believe in research, a lot of research. This one, I knew, would be super fun, because it means going to all these beautiful locations, taking tons of pictures, and attending these races and getting the feel of what it’s like, because I wanted it to feel authentic.

He and I went on the first research trip for “Cars 2.” We went over to Milan and went to the Monza Formula 1 race, the Italian Grand Prix, which was really amazing.

We went for the international press junket for “Cars” to Barcelona in conjunction with the Spanish Grand Prix, which is at a racetrack outside of Barcelona. A Formula 1 race there, and it was really cool. So, “OK, we’ve got to get one of these cars in there.”

I go back and forth: car, character, car, character, as we’re developing.

I was inspired by the notion of an open wheel in this world, because we didn’t have one yet. By putting the eyes in the windshield, it makes it so that the entire car is its head. It’s sitting over the four wheels and it becomes almost like a four legged character.

The front two wheels, because you’re used to seeing them turn, becomes their hand gestures. We don’t typically lift the tires off, partly because of the fender. But I thought, “Wow. To have an open wheel car, like Francesco, it gives us a lot more gestures.”

And so we thought, “Well this guy’s going to be gesturing like crazy. Let’s make him Italian, an Italian Formula 1 car. This will be perfect.” He’s really flamboyant. We got John Turturro to do the voice and he just killed it. It was so great. He just was amazing.

He is a little reminiscent of his character in “The Big Lebowski.”

Well, it’s one of my favorite movies. That’s one of my favorite characters of all time, the Jesus character. And he went for it.

Speaking of the Italian cars in the movie, tell me how you decided to depict the Mafia-don cars

Being towed. That’s that keeping looking back and forth: OK. Mafia dons are driven, or Mafia dons are old guys, they’re in wheelchairs and they’re pushed and they’re surrounded by their guys in black suits. And so, how can we kind of set that up? That’s one of my favorite things about this movie, is the notion of the bad guys are the lemon cars of the world who have this massive chip on their shoulder. The world has turned their back on them.

How much James Bond went into the spy elements?

Everybody immediately goes to Bond. But to me I kind of went back to my origins of loving spy stuff in “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” It started in 1964, and I was right at the right age. I was just eating it up as I was watching it. It was my favorite TV show, and then now I have five sons and we are fanatics for the Bourne movies.We’ve watched them 20-something times. My wife is so tired of them.

Those three movies are so good, because they really did elevate the spy genre. They were an inspiration to me.

Coming into this film. I was saying, “I don’t want to make a parody of a spy movie. I want to make a spy movie, but with cars as characters.”

And so there’s automatically going to be humor because of that. But Finn McMissile never pokes fun at anything. He’s very serious about what he’s doing. He’s so many steps ahead of everything. He’s thinking way, way ahead as the great spies do, but he can’t see what’s right in front of him.

Looking at [Mater], he says, “This is an American spy. What a brilliant cover this guy has. That rust must have cost a fortune.” He’s just so amazed by how good Mater is at what he does. It’s just genius. He doesn’t realize that he truly is just a tow truck.

It kind of intrigues me that you’re able to do that, go into a new genre and do it in the context of the sequel.

When we do a sequel, we want it to be very different. We don’t want to tell the same story again. And it’s much more challenging that way. The three “Toy Story” movies, they all are set in the world of Andy’s toys, and we add characters each movie. But generally it’s the same set of characters. Each one has a vastly different emotional arc to it. And they each work so differently, they’re different kinds of stories.

And the “Cars” one is different again in that, because we wanted it to be, I just flat changed genres. Because I look at the Cars world as being as big as our world.

So wherever we can go, the cars can go. But when they get there, it’s what we’re familiar with but from a different point of view, that it’s all for cars, and it’s of cars. So it’s like, Notre Dame, or the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben, will be car‑ified. And that’s what’s so fun about it. And along with that, we can just be different genres of films.

Was there a point at which you realized you could make a sequel to a movie without feeling like you were just remaking the same movie?

Well, it all started back when we started working on “Toy Story 2.” And we had two sequels in mind that we held as a shining example of what to do. “The Godfather Part II” and “The Empire Strikes Back,” I would argue, are the two greatest sequels ever made. Because they not only were great movies unto themselves, they made the originals even more interesting. You wanted to go back and watch the originals. And in two totally different ways. “The Godfather Part II” intermixed the pre‑story and the after‑story of the original. And “The Empire Strikes Back” just expanded the worlds so greatly but then gave revelations about what the heck was going on in the original. “You are my son.” And it’s like, “What!?!?!?”

So we always held those, “OK. That’s what we want to do. If we’re going to do a sequel, that’s what we’re going to do.”

Even for all the money in the world, it’s not worth doing, because to me it’s about quality. Quality is the best business plan.

What’s origin of the “Planes” movies?

When I stepped in as Chief Creative Officer for Disney Animation, there’s two studios down there. The studio that does the feature films is called Walt Disney Animation Studios. There’s a second studio called The DisneyToon Studios, which does the direct‑to‑video movies.

Before we came in, they were doing all these sequels to all the old films, “Cinderella 2,” and all that stuff. And I didn’t ever see the point of those. Once we stepped in, then we re‑conceived what this group can do. We took Tinker Bell from Peter Pan and developed a whole story about: Where did she come from and were there other fairies like her? And it became a series of films.

That was more the vision we had, developing a set of characters that could be maybe an offshoot of a film. Because I always say that you have to do three things really well to make a successful film, animation or live action. The three things: tell a compelling story, that is unpredictable, it keeps people on the edge of their seat where they can’t wait to see what happens next.

You populate that story with really memorable and appealing characters. Appealing is the key word there. You want to be with these characters, you like them so much.

And then you put that story and those characters in a believable world for the story you’re telling. Not realistic but believable, for the story you’re telling.

So then, as you do a sequel, you do a new story, but in this believable world you’ve created and with the set of characters.

In this new idea for these direct‑to‑video productions, it was like taking an offshoot of a film, a character or a notion or a world or something like that, and thinking of a whole new set of characters and new storylines that you can have multiple films based upon. I loved the world of “Cars.” It really is vast.

And I kept thinking about—I’m a big train fanatic. I love trains. And I started thinking about trains, and boats and airplanes. And I kept wanting to have more and more of those type of characters. Because in the world of “Cars,” I figured, every vehicle that you see out there is a character of some kind. Construction equipment, you name it.

We started talking about this. You know how “Laverne & Shirley” was a spin‑off of

“Happy Days”? I said, “What if we do a spin‑off of “Cars,” where we start exploring movies based upon these other types of vehicles.

So this is the notion of “Planes,” is that it’s sort of a spin‑off of that, where it’s the plane characters. And it’s their story and their world. So it’s going to be really, it’s very cool.

And is that something you could see expanding to boats, other vehicles?

Yeah. It’s one of the ideas, that there will be an ongoing series. It almost starts getting into this thing where we fall in love with these plane characters, we want to see more and more stories with them. And then you start doing other vehicles and stuff like that. Yeah. So it kind of is a bigger idea that can keep expanding.

There are a few train and plane characters in “Cars 2.”

Oh yeah. There’s a lot of trains, I got trains, I got a galloping gear grinder, we call him—the little, oh, the old Model T that’s running on the train rails at the beginning.

That’s based on a particular type of train in the early days of trains. We have the high‑speed rail, we’ve got the really cool, Sidley, the real cool airplane character. We got helicopters. Yeah, it’s fun. The boats and the yachts. And Sig Hansen, from “Deadliest Catch,” does a voice as a crab boat.

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